Questions linger amid Clinton turnaround

WASHINGTON -- The morning after Sen. Barack Obama shook the Clinton campaign last month by winning five contests in one weekend, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's new campaign manager assembled the demoralized staff.

"You may not like the person next to you," Maggie Williams told aides, according to participants. "But you're going to respect them. And we're going to work together."

Williams' demand was dismissed as wishful thinking by some in her weary audience. But in the view of many Clinton supporters, it accurately reflected the urgent need to overhaul a campaign beset by disorder and dysfunction.

Even as Clinton revived her fortunes last week with primary victories in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas, the questions lingered about how she managed her campaign, with the internal sniping and second guessing undermining her well-cultivated image as a steady-at-the-wheel chief executive surrounded by a phalanx of loyal and efficient aides.

The divisions over strategy and communications -- and animosity among her advisers -- poured into public view as Clinton struggled in February to hold off Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"She hasn't managed anything as complex as this before; that's the problem with senators," said James Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. "She wasn't as decisive as she should have been. And it's a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn't seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it."

Over the last month, Clinton, of New York, has become much more involved in the day-to-day operation of her campaign. In addition to Williams, she brought in two experienced political hands from her husband's White House -- Doug Sosnik, who was a political director, and Steve Ricchetti, a deputy chief of staff.

And Williams has sought to calm tensions in the headquarters through steps like opening the morning conference call to more aides to foster a greater sense of teamwork. One of her first acts, aides said, was to instruct Mark Penn -- Clinton's chief strategist, a polarizing figure in the campaign -- to stay off television.

Still, interviews with campaign aides, associates and friends suggest Clinton, at least until February, was a detached manager.

Juggling the demands of being a candidate, she paid little attention to detail, delegated decisions and deferred to advisers on critical questions. Clinton accepted -- or seemed unaware of -- the intense factionalism and feuding that often paralyzed her campaign.

She showed a tendency toward an insular management style, relying on a coterie of aides who have worked for her for years, her aides and associates said. Her choice of lieutenants -- and her insistence on staying with them even when friends urged her to shake things up -- was blamed by some associates for the campaign's woes. Again and again, the senator was portrayed as a manager who valued loyalty and familiarity over experience and expertise.

Clinton stood by Penn and Patti Solis Doyle, who was until last month her campaign manager, even as her campaign was at risk of letting Obama sew up the nomination.

When Clinton finally pushed out Solis Doyle, she chose Williams -- like Solis Doyle, an old friend who had never before managed a presidential campaign.

Clinton's ability to manage the one person with whom she spoke most often, former President Clinton, was also questioned.

Bill Clinton moved in his own orbit -- he heatedly argued with his wife's advisers who wanted to write off South Carolina, defying them to campaign there -- and took no direction from the campaign about what to say or where to go, some of them said. (Obama defeated Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary by nearly 29 percentage points.)

A senior adviser, Harold Ickes, joined the campaign full time in January as Clinton's aides began to realize that the contest was not going as planned. Ickes cautioned about drawing firm conclusions about her from this period, when she faced the demands of being a candidate.

"It's hard to draw conclusions about her management style," he said, "because she is, in fact, not the manager of her campaign."

For all her years on the public stage, Clinton has never come close to assembling and running an enterprise like the 700-person, $170 million-and-counting campaign organization that she has created. At times, her aides made assumptions about tactics and voters that turned out to be wrong. They nearly ran out of money at all the wrong times, like just after Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary and right before the 22 state nominating contests on Feb. 5.

Unlike Bush, Clinton has shown no interest in having one strong person running all aspects of the campaign operation. And unlike her husband during the early part of his 1992 bid for the presidency, she does not try to keep a hand in everything, with lines of communications all through the campaign.

This approach, many of her associates said, had the effect of breeding resentment at campaign headquarters. Since there was no one person in charge, they said, it was hard to make decisions, and Penn would frequently use his personal connection with Clinton to block the campaign from moving in directions he opposed.

Penn has been at the center of much of this turmoil.

Penn and Ickes held a level of disdain for each other that helped poison what was already a toxic atmosphere in the Clinton headquarters, advisers said. Shouting matches between senior advisers became routine, sometimes behind closed doors and sometimes not.

Aides fought over Penn's strategy of presenting Clinton as a strong commander in chief rather than trying to humanize her, as aides such as admaker Mandy Grunwald and chief spokesman Howard Wolfson wanted to do. They fought over deployment of assets and dwindling resources, pointing fingers over the failure to field organizations in many states. They fought over how to handle former President Clinton and his habit of drifting away from his talking points.

"You just lost the campaign for us," Clinton's media adviser, Grunwald, shouted at Penn after the campaign came under fire for running a radio advertisement in South Carolina that made the questionable claim that Obama was a proponent of Republican ideas. Her words reverberated across a campaign headquarters already dispirited and spent.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.